Blair's 'weapons of mass distraction'

Tony Blair flew to Iraq yesterday - and massively downgraded weapons of mass destruction as the main reason for going to war there.

He used a ten-minute address to 600 British troops in Basra to stress how "passionately" he believed in the "enormous importance" of ousting an abhorrent regime based on torture and repression.

But as he determinedly played up the humanitarian motives for launching the conflict, he committed a telling slip, describing WMD as "weapons of mass distraction".

That will be interpreted in Westminster as an accidental admission that by choosing to base his reasons for launching the conflict on Saddam Hussein's alleged deadly arsenal, Mr Blair made a serious political error which has undermined him in the eyes of the public and his party.

Later the Prime Minister indicated that British soldiers would be present in Iraq in an open-ended commitment lasting years.

Troops to be reduced

Speaking on his chartered jet back to Heathrow last night, he did, however, stress that the numbers of troops would be reduced gradually.

Asked how long British troops would be in Iraq, Mr Blair said: "I just don't know. But I think it is the scale that is as important as anything else. If you look at Afghanistan today our troop numbers are down to three figures."

His surprise visit earlier to the Shaiba base, the British Army's main headquarters in Iraq, appeared to be an attempt to justify yet again why he chose to join the US-led invasion.

Mr Blair's problem is that when he ordered British forces into Iraq last year, he did so on the legal grounds that Saddam had chemical, biological and, potentially, nuclear weapons that could destroy cities both inside and outside Iraq, and was prepared to fire them within 45 minutes.

Not a single fragment of evidence for this has been found.

Moving the goalposts

Yesterday's stage-managed visit appeared to be an attempt to move the goalposts on to firmer ground as he prepares to face a gruelling month ahead.

Mr Blair fears he will suffer severe political damage in mid-January when Lord Hutton releases his potentially devastating report into the events that led up to the death of Iraq weapons expert Dr David Kelly.

When that happens, Mr Blair would prefer to be defending the war as a humanitarian triumph rather than in the light of WMD which have not turned up.

The Prime Minister flew into Iraq aboard an RAF transport jet and military helicopter from a family holiday in the Egyptian resort of Sharm-el-Sheik.

Talking up the good news

His visit came as his aides began to talk up the good news.

They claimed there had been no direct attacks on British troops in southern Iraq since August. There had been six bombs in the last month but the number was reducing.

Some 78 per cent of households now had running water compared to none after the war. Mr Blair told the troops that the conflict was of "enormous importance". He said it was a kind of test case.

Saddam's regime was "so abhorrent that, as you will know now better than you did before, literally hundreds of thousands of its citizens died in prison camps, in the ways of torture and repression.

"And if we had backed away from that, we would never have been able to confront this threat in the other countries where it exists."

Verbal gaffe

But having made his humanitarian case, Mr Blair made his verbal gaffe. Explaining the types of threats the world faces from rogue states, he said: "The other threats (come from) brutal and repressive states, who because of their brutality, because they don't actually have the support or consent of their people, are developing weapons that could cause distraction and the destruction on a massive scale and are a huge, huge liability for the security of the whole world."

Mr Blair also told the troops: "The British armed forces today are the new pioneers of soldiering in the 21st century because the threat that we face today is not the one that certainly my generation grew up with. It's not the prospect of a big world war where countries are fighting each other."

Blair outlines threats

The threat now was chaos, said the Prime Minister, adding: "That chaos comes today from terrorism, from a particular virus of Islamic extremism that's a perversion of the true faith of Islam but is none the less incredibly dangerous."

The other threat came from repressive states building up arsenals of weapons of mass destruction, he said.

No democratic government "that owes its position to the will of the people would spend billions of pounds on chemical, biological and nuclear weapons while their people live in poverty". Mr Blair admitted: "There are a few different opinions about the wisdom of conflict."

But he said there was nobody at home who did not have "enormous pride in the British armed forces".

He said they should know that they were not just fighting because they had been ordered to "but that the work that you have been doing here has been in a noble and just cause, and it has".

He again stressed how for decades before the British action, the Iraqi people had known nothing but "the secret police, poverty, utter dependence on the state, fear, and an inability to make any difference to the country in which they lived".

He said they now "have some hope and some prospect of a future thanks to you".

In his most emotional passage, he declared: "I believe you know how passionately I believed in this cause and in the wisdom of the conflict."

He said he believed that "in years to come people here in this country, and I believe around the world, will look back on what you have done and give thanks and recognise that they owe you a tremendous debt of gratitude".